Steele: I'd join the tea parties

Michael Steele said Tuesday that if he was not chairman of the Republican National Committee, he’d be a tea party protester.

“As I like to tell people — long before there was this big push on tea parties — if I wasn't doing this job, I'd be out there with the tea partiers,” Steele said during an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto.

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Steele said the “schism” between the anti-tax protesters and the GOP is “overrated” — despite the fact that tea party organizers refuse to align themselves with the Republican Party.

“The reality is there's enough things we have in common to fight for than to waste time fighting against each other on one or two things that don't really matter,” the RNC chairman said, though he did not elaborate on which issues are not important.

Steele has actively been courting tea party groups, helping to put together a rally outside the U.S. Capitol and teaming up on health care with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey — whose group FreedomWorks organizes tea party protests around the country.

In claiming that reports of GOP infighting are overblown, Steele attempted to rebuff some of outgoing Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer’s criticism of the party.

During a conference call following his resignation on Tuesday, Greer chided state activists who were willing to “burn the house down and try to destroy the Republican Party.”

“I am not a purist,” Greer said. “I cannot be a participant in the shredding and tearing in the fabric of the Republican Party.”

Responding to Greer, Steele said there was “a lot more going on there than meets the eye.”

“That’s why I'm getting back to this conservative movement in the party or whatever you want to call it,” he said. “I don’t want to put labels on it. It’s more pronounced than we know.”